Michael Church's blog

Category: Uncategorized

Hansel und Gretel, Royal Opera House The popularity of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel goes up and down like a yo-yo. After its premiere – conducted by Richard Strauss, who admired ...Read More

Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times By Alan Walker Faber £30.00 727 pp Farrar Strauss & Giroux $40.00 There have been many biographies of Chopin, and countless studies of his works, but this is the...Read More

War Requiem, ENO Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is all bells, children’s choirs, trumpet calls, choral shouts, solo voices leaping out like flames, and angular melodic lines over a ground-bass of ...Read More

Porgy and Bess, ENO Mired in trouble thanks to a series of avoidable but calamitous artistic misjudgements, English National Opera desperately needs a wise hand on the tiller. And if its three-way co-...Read More

Radamisto, Hackney Empire Coming fresh from a clunkily over-heated Ring at Covent Garden, and a deranged travesty of Salome at the Coliseum, it’s sweet relief to encounter English Touring Opera’s ...Read More

Salome, English National Opera ‘We begin in darkness,’ proclaims an essay by Elena Manafi in the programme, ‘a confrontation with the abyss of the feminine.’ Adena Jacobs’s new production of...Read More

Verbier can still spring surprises, even at the venerable age of twenty-five. Marking that anniversary with a gala concert this summer, they corralled more musical celebrities on stage than had ever b...Read More

Paul Bunyan, ENO at Wilton’s As the poet Stephen Spender lamented, Britain never got the great opera which should have resulted from that seemingly dream pairing, Benjamin Britten and WH Auden. The...Read More

Tosca, Grand Theatre, Leeds Post-Weinstein, and following revelations of world-wide corruption in the Catholic church, recent history has played into the hands of any director who wants to give Puccin...Read More